Smaller win in a suit against Penn

Eight months ago, Frank Reynolds won a breach-of-contract lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania, along with $435,678 in damages, for not getting what he thought he'd paid for: a degree elevating him with the brand name of Penn's prestigious Wharton School.

On Tuesday, Reynolds won a lesser victory: $66,000 in damages. In a new trial forced by Penn, jurors decided that there was no breach of contract but that Penn had unjustly enriched itself by taking Reynolds' tuition for its executive master's in technology management program.

Reynolds, now chief executive officer of a biotech start-up, InVivo Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass., pronounced himself pleased with Tuesday's verdict after the second trial before Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas N. O'Neill Jr.

"This is David beats Goliath," said Reynolds, 46. "This was never about the money."

Penn's outside counsel, James P. Golden, said he planned to file a motion seeking to have the second verdict overturned. But he, too, portrayed the jurors' verdict as a success.

"I'm glad that they found that the university didn't breach a contract - that's good," Golden said. "It's also good that it's a smaller award."

Golden tried to discredit Reynolds with testimony showing that evidence he initially offered, including a copy of a PowerPoint presentation and e-mail passed among students, had been altered. Reynolds said that he didn't know how the documents had been falsified and that his claim did not rely on them.

O'Neill ordered a new trial because he said he had mistakenly barred evidence about the alterations.

Reynolds' dispute arose in 2003, about a year after he entered the technology management program, which since 1998 had been cosponsored by Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and Wharton. The program leads to a master's in engineering degree from Penn and a certificate cosigned by the deans of the engineering school and of Wharton.

Reynolds and his attorney, Richard J. Heleniak, contended in court that something crucial changed as Reynolds started his second year.

Students who considered themselves part of Wharton, and who expected to be full-fledged Wharton alumni, were hearing something different, Reynolds and Heleniak said. Reynolds said he was even threatened with discipline for portraying himself as a Wharton student.

Reynolds said he had first heard of the technology program from an ad in a US Airways magazine that promoted Wharton's cosponsorship, and learned more about it when he went to the Wharton website and clicked on a link.

He already had a master's in business administration from St. Joseph's University, but he wanted a more prestigious degree to further his ambitions.

Reynolds testified that he saw results immediately. He had been making about $50,000 a year as the chief executive of a small consulting company. Within about a month of starting the program, and with help from the Wharton career-services office, he had a new job at Siemens AG, the German technology conglomerate. He was paid about $269,000 a year as its director of global business development.

"It was exactly what I was paying for at Wharton. I was on top of the world," Reynolds testified.

Two years later, he was so unhappy that he had decided to apply to another top-tier business program. In 2006, he earned an M.B.A. from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Penn officials testified that nothing important changed in the technology-management program while Reynolds was a student, despite shifts in leadership that included a codirector's failure to gain tenure at Wharton. But their testimony indicated that they were concerned about the nuances of how the technology-management program was portrayed.

The jury did not hear all possible evidence of their concerns. Saying it was a "remedial action" by Penn, O'Neill excluded a video of a "town hall" meeting in November 2003 at which Penn officials sought to clarify the limits of the program's affiliation with Wharton. Nor did the jury hear that, after the dispute arose, technology-management students were told that they would be "honorary alumni" of Wharton.